South Lakes Safari Zoo
Just as we did last year, my fiancé and I decided to book a relatively last minute day trip to South Lakes Safari Zoo (previously South Lakes Wild Animal Park), this year we went with Durham City Coaches as Classic Coaches didn't have any good dates for their trip. I've used both companies in the past and they're both great, the only difference is I think Classic had a toilet on the bus last year whereas Durham City didn't have one this year and its a four hour journey (they do stop for 15min at Scotch Corner though).
The pick up time was an hour later than last year so we didn't arrive at the zoo until 12:20 and didn't get in until around 12:40 due to the zoo being rearranged and there being a different entrance now - the entrance was very busy, this is probably due to the new offer the zoo has which means children get in free with a paying adult.
We didn't get a map on the way in as everything seemed a bit disorganised with the long queue of people wanting to buy tickets and the coach loads of people arriving who already had tickets, as there doesn't seem to be a separate entrance for the two. The map also isn't available on the website, and the internet reception in the zoo is very limited, especially in the new areas.
It was a lovely hot and sunny day, just like last year, and although we only had four hours in the zoo we still got to see pretty much everything we wanted to, if it had been our first visit to the zoo we might have been a little disappointed as we wouldn't have been able to get around the full zoo in that amount of time.
I also bumped into a familiar face while at the zoo - a manager from work! I've not seen him since so i'm not sure how much he enjoyed it.
The zoo seems to offer a lot more activities than last year, but they all have additional costs, we didn't really look into it as we didn't find out until we arrived and were advised by the staff who gave us our wrist bands (also a new addition) that all the tills were busy dealing with the queue of people who wanted tickets so we should wait 15-20min before we tried to buy animal food or book a animal feeding so we skipped it as we were already on a tight schedule.
We went to both the tiger feeding and the big cat feeding - on a Monday it's the snow leopards, i'm glad it was as I don't think I saw them last year, but i'm still disappointed it wasn't the jaguars as they've been my favourite since I watched their feeding when they were around 6 months old.
But as always, my favourite animal overall was the ring tailed lemur, and as I was taking photographs of one of them I ended up having rude and obnoxious comments made behind me by people who were on my coach! "how many photographs do you want? are you not done?", clearly, if I was done i'd have stopped taking them and went elsewhere in the zoo.
The people who were on my coach were the only downside to the trip, they did absolutely nothing other than complain. They complained about the driver, they complained about how he drove, how long it took, how he clearly took the longest road he could find, how they'd have been there by 10:30 if they drove there themselves (completely missing the fact that it takes so long to get there because there are other pick ups in other towns and cities along the way that aren't exactly on the route to the zoo.) And to top it off, they came back to the bus late, at every single stop off, and they even said they were going to do it when they got off the bus - they were going to 'get every minute' they paid for in the zoo, and this was ALL because the zoo staff were busy so didn't RUN to the coach to collect us and took around 10minutes, but to be fair the bus driver was in the wrong car park (he did follow the coach signs) but a few days before the trip, the zoo posted on Facebook that coaches were required to use a different car park, it probably would have been better for the zoo to call or email the companies they work with directly).
But as always, my favourite animal overall was the ring tailed lemur, and as I was taking photographs of one of them I ended up having rude and obnoxious comments made behind me by people who were on my coach! "how many photographs do you want? are you not done?", clearly, if I was done i'd have stopped taking them and went elsewhere in the zoo.
The people who were on my coach were the only downside to the trip, they did absolutely nothing other than complain. They complained about the driver, they complained about how he drove, how long it took, how he clearly took the longest road he could find, how they'd have been there by 10:30 if they drove there themselves (completely missing the fact that it takes so long to get there because there are other pick ups in other towns and cities along the way that aren't exactly on the route to the zoo.) And to top it off, they came back to the bus late, at every single stop off, and they even said they were going to do it when they got off the bus - they were going to 'get every minute' they paid for in the zoo, and this was ALL because the zoo staff were busy so didn't RUN to the coach to collect us and took around 10minutes, but to be fair the bus driver was in the wrong car park (he did follow the coach signs) but a few days before the trip, the zoo posted on Facebook that coaches were required to use a different car park, it probably would have been better for the zoo to call or email the companies they work with directly).
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